Make them pay

Page Tools

The burden of assessing the soundness of a wine should fall on the restaurant.Photo: George Fetting

The burden of assessing the soundness of a wine should
fall on the restaurant, not the diner, says Ben
Giliberti.

Ordering wine in restaurants is still much too hard. Although
wine lists are becoming better organised and more descriptive all
the time, most restaurants don't have a sommelier on staff.

The sommelier's job is to know every wine on the list, every
dish the chef is preparing and every combination of wine and food
that will make the journey to a great meal as smooth as a good
bechamel. Without a sommelier to help, choosing the right wine can
be a guessing game for most diners.

Without guidance from an expert, diners are often forced to face
the awkwardness of the "moment of truth". That moment occurs when
the waiter materialises beside your table with the wine you have
selected, holds the bottle a few centimetres from your nose for you
to inspect the label, pops the cork and splashes a bit of the wine
in your glass. As he towers over you, you are put on the unenviable
spot of publicly having to give an instant thumbs up or thumbs down
on the wine. You do the best you can, but unless a wine is
grotesquely flawed or obviously corked, you'll probably accept it
rather than confront the waiter.

Unfortunately, even though you may later discover that it has a
serious defect, according to the rules of restaurant etiquette,
you're pretty much stuck once you accept the wine.

I find this state of affairs unacceptable. The risk of assessing
the soundness of a wine should fall first on the restaurant, before
the wine ever hits your glass. This used to be a key part of the
sommelier's job. Traditionally, the sommelier appears at your table
with the wine you ordered and pours a small amount of wine for
evaluation into the silver tastevinage (tahst-vee-nahj) cup that
hangs around his neck. Because he is an expert, the sniffing and
swirling he does in his cup is far more likely to identify
corkiness or other defects in the wine. This puts the pressure
where it belongs - on a professional, rather than on the diner.

It's time to redress the balance. My solution is a protocol that
I call "make them pay". It would work this way: When a diner
identifies a flawed or corked bottle of wine, he is not charged for
the flawed bottle. This is the current practice. Plus, under my
system, he is not charged for the replacement bottle, either. In
short, if a customer has to bring a bad bottle to the house's
attention, the wine is on the house.

At first this may seem a little harsh on the restaurant. After
all, it didn't intentionally serve a bad bottle. In a sense, it is
a victim, too. My answer? The restaurant made money on each of the
bad bottles. And diners have endured enough. If restaurants want to
save money by dispensing with professional sommeliers, whose job it
is to protect diners from bad wines, they should have to pay up
when their customers do the job for them.

Although I expect howls of protest from restaurants initially,
they are ultimately the beneficiaries. When the unpleasant taste of
a bad wine sours a meal, the diner will not necessarily blame the
wine. He is more likely to blame the restaurant, the kitchen and
the chef, and he almost certainly won't be a return customer. For
the price of a bottle of wine, the restaurant has lost a client.
This is in no one's interest.

A policy that offers a replacement bottle for free sends an
important message to the customer - you are a valued patron; we
want to know if there is a problem, and we don't want to lose your
loyalty over a bad bottle of wine.

It's also an important acknowledgment that assessing the
condition of a wine is primarily the restaurant's responsibility.
In the days when sommeliers were de rigueur at better restaurants,
no one questioned this standard. As far as I'm concerned, it's
still the standard.

I also have a word for consumers: My hope is that the incentive
of a "free" bottle will encourage you to educate yourself about
pleasure-robbing flaws in wine and help you get past the anxiety of
sending back a bad bottle. But it also imposes a responsibility.
Don't abuse the privilege. If you have ordered poorly, or simply
don't like the wine you ordered, that's just tough. The restaurant
is responsible only for defective bottles. It can't afford to be
the guarantor that you have ordered wisely.

Finally, if you want to experience the luxury of anxiety-free
wine ordering, patronise restaurants that employ full-time,
professional sommeliers.